Chihuly madly tropical
Where better for an internationally renowned artist to exhibit his glass
sculptures than the world’s most famous glasshouse? Tim Richardson
visits an extraordinary new installation at Kew

Those of us who admire plants are quite used to nature astounding
us. Art inspired by nature has to work much harder to be anything like
as engaging as the real thing. But a new exhibition at the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, successfully melds art and craft with a deep intuitive
understanding of the unstoppable creative forces at work in the natural
world.

As of last week, and until the middle of January 2006, the Temperate
House, Princess of Wales Conservatory and the lake in front of the Palm
House will bear the traces of an invasion by Seattle-based glass artist
Dale Chihuly's astonishingly colourful and exuberant pieces of glass
art.

Chihuly is a phenomenon: an internationally acclaimed artist-craftsman,
he also has a large popular following (his work can be found in 200
museums worldwide). Since 1965, when he first started experimenting
with blowing glass, he has developed an immediately recognisable style:
eye-poppingly bright pieces, often on a large scale, that writhe with
movement and echo the unpredictable variations of organic forms in nature.
His work has been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the V&A
in South Kensington (in 1991), where a huge Chihuly ''chandelier'' still
graces the entrance hall, and also at several botanical institutions
in the USA - dress rehearsals for the Kew show.

The heart of the exhibition is the Temperate House, designed by Decimus
Burton in 1860 and home to a collection of tender woody plants, arranged
geographically. Here, the glass pieces have either been placed right
in among the plants, or presented more formally on black metal platforms.
Among Chihuly's most recognisable forms are the spear-like reeds, colourful
globular floats, macchia (like clamshells), chandeliers of entwined
tentacles, towers (which are upside-down chandeliers) and ''ikebana''
displays of twin stems emerging from vividly coloured vases.

Despite their obvious artificiality, the glass pieces complement the
plants extremely well. Chihuly has been evolving these series since
the 1970s, continually varying them and experimenting. Their botanical
setting brings to mind the habits of plants in the wild: grouped in
clusters or spread as if self-seeded, with small mutations and differences
in size and shape, and as violently coloured as nature in the tropics.
There are other similarities: glass objects, like flowers, are usually
much tougher than they look; Chihuly's many studio failures die like
plants in the wild, while different types of light can transform them.
The frozen liquidity of glass as a material also seems appropriate in
the fecund setting of the hothouse.

Chihuly explains: ''I love to juxtapose the man-made and the natural,
to make people wonder and ask, 'Are they manufactured or did they come
from nature?' "

One of the most beguiling exhibits is a cluster of slender vertical
lavender reeds set in the shade of giant tree ferns: there is the contrast
of texture between the shaggy stems of the ferns and the perfectly smooth
glass, but it is the gorgeously unusual colour combination of lavender
in dusky green light that is most affecting.

Elswehere in the Temperate House, the surface of a pond is adorned
with orange-yellow discs that look like thin, translucent slices of
fruit, some turned up at the edges, a scene that is prefaced by a magnificent
group of bright-white arum lilies.

Another wonderful moment is the discovery of a set of red-orange reeds
amid the massive red-brown stems of the banana Musa basjoo, shaded by
its vast, graceful leaves. Nearby is a cluster of clear glass tendrils
that thrust above the delicate white star-shaped flowers of Arthropodium
cirrhatum, while another section of the Temperate House is graced with
a vivid-red chandelier that seems to be exploding overhead. Elsewhere,
glass forms that look like extra-terrestrial octopi - a mass of yellow
tentacles and green, silvery and blue bulbs - clasp or encrust the four
vertical columns.

The hothouse plants (in this case the purple trumpet-flowered climber
Calystegia affinis) are already beginning to entwine the glass
pieces, as if in acceptance.

The exhibition continues outside, where the most dramatic intervention
is several score of multi-coloured, onion-like floats (which Chihuly
calls Walla Wallas), scattered on the lake in front of the
Palm House. Their incongruity is amusing enough, but one vista from
the far side of the lake makes this piece into something of a folly
itself, in keeping with the temples (and pagoda) that William Chambers
added to Kew in the 18th century. A giant tree (Taxodium distichum)
frames a view that takes in a boat in the foreground, crammed with coloured
gourds and grasping tentacles, over the floating Walla Wallas,
then progresses on to the tall scarlet and orange towers that flank
the entrance to the Palm House.

It is unusual for an artist of this calibre to become involved in a
sculpture in the garden initiative but, for Chihuly, Kew has double
appeal: there is the botanical setting, which his work clearly complements,
and also the fact that it is the home of the Palm House, the world's
most famous glasshouse. Chihuly's interest was piqued by the idea of
putting his glass sculptures inside a glass building, amid the tropical
plants that have such an affinity with his work. An added bonus is that
the pieces are atmospherically lit after dark, and visitors will be
able to appreciate this in summer on a series of special night-time
tours, and as the days shorten, during normal autumn and winter opening
hours.

Gardens of Glass: Chihuly at Kew, May 28 to January 15, 2006. Private
views at dusk on July 27, August 31, Sept 28 and December 8 (to book
tickets ring 0870 150 5415).

Children's activities will be happening daily from July 23 to September
6 on a first-come, first-served basis.